I.J. Information Technology and Computer Science, 2014, 06, 61-67 Published Online May 2014 in MECS (http://www.mecs-press.org/) DOI: 10.5815/ijitcs.2014.06.09 Copyright © 2014 MECS I.J. Information Technology and Computer Science, 2014, 06, 61-67 Impact of Collaborative ALM on Software Project Management Engr. Tahmoor Shoukat University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila, Pakistan Email: tahmoor.shoukat@gmail.com Muhammad Nadeem Majeed University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila, Pakistan Email: nadeem.majeed@uettaxila.edu.pk Abstract — To produce a release of software, ALM is a key for streaming the team‘s ability. ALM consists of the core disciplines of requirements definition and its management, asset management, development, build creation, testing, and release that are all planned by project management and orchestrated by using some form of process [1]. The assets and their relationships are stored by the development team repository. Detailed reports and charts provide visibility into team‘s progress. In this paper we will describe how the ALM involves software development activities and assets coordination for the production and management of software applications throughout their entire life cycle. Index Terms — Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Configuration Management (CM) I. INTRODUCTION ALM describe management methods for development of software and IT infrastructure by process automation from one end to another, and integration of information from different steps. Accuracy and regularity is attained along with automation opportunities are introduced through integration. ALM solutions defined by Forrester [2] as: “Integrated tool sets that support and unite the following life-cycle activities: requirements management, design and modeling, development, software configuration management (SCM), and testing.” The three core pillars of ALM are: 1) Artifacts relationship and their complete traceability: This is usually a manual process, where increase in effort required with the increase in size of projects, the number of artifact interdependencies and the varying size and scope. Traceability is necessity for the compliance of new requirements. 2) High-level processes automation: Paper-based approvals are commonly used in the development organizations to manage the handoffs between functional domains. ALM increases the worth of handoffs through automation and maintaining the centralized repository for all related documents. 3) Visibility can be increased with reporting: Usually managers have limited visibility of development projects to track progress. Limited visibility and lack of reporting hinders the possibilities for process improvement. ALM provide the deep-dive analysis of all activities with integration and automation provides the status in real-time. Automation, traceability and tracking accurate progress usually difficult to achieve because contrasting tools do not provide adequate integration. For makers, ALM solution has been a junction to build modeling tools, visualization tools, compilers, IDE‘s, source code and configuration management tools. Main advantage of ALM solution is that, all the stakeholders of project share the updated information. Here project managers, developers, testers, architects, system administrators, business sponsors and users are considered as stakeholders. Activities typically supported by ALM solution are requirements elicitation, modeling for solutions, visual designs, development, quality control, maintenance and issue tracking. All the artifacts resulted from these activities are linked together through ALM tools. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the impact on People, process, information and tools. Section 3 describes the knowledge areas for effective ALM and SPM. Section 4 highlights the business issues and Section 5 explains success indicators. Conclusion added in the final section. II. PEOPLE, PROCESS, INFORMATION, AND TOOLS THAT DRIVE THE LIFE CYCLE In real world, peoples from the various teams are distributed around the world and they must co-ordinate and collaborate to develop the applications in limited time, while in some cases stick to government regulations. To streamline the team‘s performance and efficiency without obstructing the progress is major challenge at any point of the software development. Products must be exposed to market to receive the changing response and products must be constantly updated to retain the interest and fresh look. That‘s why the demand has dramatically